Turning Good Managers Into Great Coaches

I firmly believe that all great managers have exceptional coaching skills, otherwise they would never reach that high of a level. However, knowing the most effective way to coach a department full of diverse personalities and working styles requires effective and continuous training for managers, no matter how long they’ve been on the job. 

One of my philosophies is that a healthy organization is like a strong and healthy tree filled with delicious fruit on dozens of sturdy branches. Furthermore, instead of a traditional organizational chart with the CEO listed at the top, it’s more like a tree with me, the CEO, at the bottom. It’s the CEO's job to create a solid foundation, or trunk, that everything else spreads out from. The management team are the branches and my employees are the fruit. In order to give the fruit the best chance to ripen, management must provide strong branches that can withstand occasional stormy weather. Coaching skills help those branches become virtually stormproof.

Here are steps to creating strong coaches out of managers and supervisors:

1. Convince them of the benefits of becoming a coach

None of what I talk about will work unless your managers have bought into the program, so you must convince them why it’s to their benefit—and the benefit of the organization—for them to learn how to coach their employees. You can convince most managers fairly quickly. Showing them how effectively coaching their employees will increase performance, effectiveness, engagement and, yes, happiness within the department is usually all it takes for them to get on board. Others, however, may take a little more convincing.

When I say this, it’s not to insinuate that these are bad managers or that they’re being uncooperative. Most people, before they become managers, are rewarded for their individual skills and their ability to get work done. Often, that’s how they become promoted to manager. Moving from employee to manager requires a different set of skills and coaching skills—active listening, questioning, building rapport, constructive analysis, feedback and empathy—can be intimidating to grasp. It’s your job to assure them that the organization wants them to learn and will give them time to do so.

2. Set clear expectations for your managers—in other words, explain what coaching is and what it isn’t  

How does your organization define the word, “coaching”? Far too many take the traditional image of an athletic coach—complete with a ball cap, sunglasses and a whistle—as the authoritarian person barking orders and instructions on how to do everything. While that may work on the football field, it doesn’t work in business.

I like the definition used by the British Journal of Administrative Management: “Coaching takes a holistic view of the individual: work, corporate values, personal needs and career development are made to work in synergy, not against one another.” In business, successful coaching is collaborative, not confrontational. I see the main areas of coaching for most managers falling into one of the following categories—any of which can be done singularly or as a group:

• Career coaching – to clarify the employee’s career direction and to initiate action
• Performance coaching – filling gaps in performance and making plans for future professional development
• Skills coaching – skill development to meet organizational needs
• New manager leadership coaching – helping a newly promoted manager to quickly adapt to and achieve business goals
• High potential coaching – identifying and assessing potential candidates for succession coaching
• Succession coaching – developing candidates for the highest-level positions to keep the leadership pipeline full

I’ve only listed six here, but there are many other forms of business coaching. However, I feel that those are, more or less, offshoots of these six. As an organization, define how you want each of these accomplished, evaluated and measured and then pass it on to your managers.

One last thing I want to emphasize is that coaching is not a disciplinary action. While coaching and counseling should be a part of nearly every disciplinary program, coaching is not solely limited to it.

3. Show … don’t tell  

What’s the old phrase about giving someone a fish? This is the mistake many managers make when coaching an employee—especially a staff member struggling in some aspect of his or her job. Managers are sometimes impatient, rushed, overloaded with work or pressed for time. They’re trying to be patient, but instead of leading a discussion on solving a problem and allow the employee to figure it out, the manager just supplies the answer to the problem. This is where the fish comes in.

To paraphrase from a business perspective, “Give your team the answer and you empower them just once, but teach them how to solve problems and you empower them for a lifetime.” Your management team must have training on problem solving, active listening, communication and, most importantly, emotional intelligence. By being competent in these areas, your managers will use them extensively in their coaching situations and will pass the skills down to staff.

These are the three main pieces of creating an effective coaching program for your managers to allow them to accelerate their transformation from manager to coach. But, what does a successful coach look like?

The 10 characteristics of an effective and successful coach

Finally, I want to list the 10 characteristics of a successful coach. When you train your managers, make sure they get instruction and practice with all 10.

1. Emotionally intelligent – Being able to empathize with the employees’ situations is critical
2. Trustworthy – Without trust between coach and employee, you’re wasting your time
3. Confidence – Approach each coaching encounter with an air of confidence so the employee trusts you to guide him or her to the best areas of opportunity
4. Active listener – In order to guide the employee, a good coach listens to what the employee is really saying
5. Provides accountability – If employees trust that the manager/coach will hold them accountable for their professional development plans, their motivation is driven harder
6. Delivers Quality feedback – Feedback is critical in the relationship so the coach must give examples of the expected outcome and what it looks like as well as point out specific times when an employee fell short
7. Asks the right questions – Helps employees self-identify areas of improvement by asking open-ended and leading questions
8. Be a realist – Some changes won’t happen overnight, and others might take a lot longer, so help employees set realistic improvement targets with check-ups built in
9. Cheerleader – Coaches should be the employees’ biggest fan and cheer every area of progress
10. And finally, be consistent. To make coaching successful, you must stay consistent at it.  

Coaching employees to greater success feels better than anything else you will do as a manager. As an executive, coaching your managers to success creates an organization that demolishes the silo mentality that cripples unsuccessful ones and builds an agile and flexible company that can survive almost any challenge.